Solidarity Forever, our Union Does Kids Wrong!: the Tucson Education Assocation's recipe for extortion.

Here's a recipe for extortion:

1. Set up a monopolistic public-school system. Don't provide vouchers or even tax credits to parents who take responsibility for their own childrens' education; let the double-payments trap make school choice a luxury.
   
2. Limit choice even within that system. Go out of your way to find nonsensical restrictions to place on high-performing charter schools, the better to make all options affordable to the average Joe equal.
   
3. Bundle most of a major city's schools in a single administrative district.
   
4. Although teaching is a highly individualized profession--teachers are not fungible--allow the teachers' union to impose an equal-pay-for-equal-work salary structure instead of market-oriented "merit pay", which incentivizes performance and rewards excellence.
   
5. Accept a contract without a clause preventing strikes or requiring honesty in taking of sick leave.
   

The result: Salary negotiations are handled en masse, and if the teachers' side isn't getting what it wants, it can cause massive disruption by shutting down the schools. The parents who can least accommodate having the kids home during the day--public school parents--pick up the slack, and it's only so long until the school board buckles.

I'm not about to say what sort of pay raise the TUSD teachers should get, and it's worth noting that the difference between the school board and the teachers' union is over more than just the raise.

What's clear, however, is that the current system is set up to stick it to two groups: the first being parents (largely working-class in this district), who bear the cost of these labor disputes by having to take off of work or hire sitters, and the second being the children, who lose a day of study and effectively more, once the distraction and scramble are done.

As correctly noted by the Star, last Friday was TUSD's second sickout in recent memory. If TUSD were a private school, parents would be wary. Since TUSD isn't, parents should be irate. It's high time that the stand was taken, for no more sickouts, ever. That doesn't mean to cave into every demand of the union.

The long term solution, the one that's best for parents, kids, and the community is to bust the union, gently. If the teachers are going to play hardball, with sham sick days, the district ought play right back and insist on merit pay. Moreover, and more importantly, the State should move towards full school choice--every child is in a school actively chosen by the parent--in two ways simultaneously. A goal should be set: all public schools become charters by 2015. Furthermore, a real tuition tax credit system, that gives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit with a high cap to parents, grandparents, godparents, well-meaning negihbors, and anyone else who directly pays for a kid's private education or homeschooling expenses, should be instituted, giving more families the option of free-market education.

In a market system, parent's don't have to wait for politicians to do as they ought--which rarely happens--for reform. Furthermore, they can escape schools with perennial labor problems. Most acutely, any particular school's labor problems won't disrupt a major city!

Kromko's lost his moxie.

I should probably have 'blogged about this last week, before it began being reported in bits and pieces:

After several successful alliances on local issues, the Pima County Libertarian Party asked John Kromko to run for mayor, on their ticket. This was going to happen, until the day of the deadline, when Kromko gathered his "Water Users' Bill of Rights" supporters who, for bizzare reasons, didn't like the idea. In an act of cowardice, Kromko decided against running as a Libertarian.

Someone from the Green Party supposedly told Kromko that Dave Croteau would withdraw from the race if Kromko decided to run as a Green. (What the difference is between running as a Green and running as a Libertarian, from the perspective of the Enough! crowd, is beyond me.) What a slap in the face to Dave Ewoldt and the rest who are working to put together a respectable campaign for Croteau!

What I didn't know until I picked up the paper today is that Kromko actually filed to run as a Green, and subsequently withdrew due to lack of funds. If he'd had enough moxie to run as a Libertarian, he'd be in the race--the Libertarians have had trouble finding candidates this cycle--and would have bully pulpit from which to promote his initiative. (He was also going to take Clean Elections money, so the official excuse doesn't make any sense.)

Apparently, John Kromko's courage has gone the way of his mojo. Perhaps it's time for him to retire. Perhaps this is retirement.

Your tax dollars at work.

I'm a grad student in a department at the University of Arizona that'll go unnamed for now.

In a building full of high-tech equipment, one thing stood out: the old, 1960s-vintage Western Electric model 2500 phones, in a dingy cross between tan and Pepto-Bismol pink. I took their continued presense as a sign of (much appreciated) fiscal austerity, given the department's seemingly endless budget crises.

There are still old folks out there leasing their phones, and I just found out that the department is one of them. The phones were still being rented, for over $20 per month! Assuming 50 phones in the department, this comes to $1000 per month, or $10000 per year! So much for fiscal austerity!

A young office assistant came around today with replacement phones that cost less than two months' rental on the old ones, and told me this when I asked where the old Western Electric models were going. It was so outrageous, I had to confirm it in the business office.

It would seem that a little slice of Soviet efficiency lurks wherever your tax dollars are at work!

What, then, isn't a land-use regulation?

The city of Tucson has a love-hate relationship with so-called "big box" stores. On the one hand, your average Joe or Jose shops at the superstores, from the early-morning opening to the late-night closing. Tucsonans like the big-boxes so much that where they can--outside city limits--many stay open 24 hours. It's also no secret that Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes, and Food City (in addition to the anchor department stores at the various malls) make Tucson a weekend shopping destination for quite a few Sonorans.

On the other hand, the big boxes, especially Wal-Mart, are the target of quite a few affluent NIMBYs, who for varying, mainly aesthetic, reasons--it's a symbol of the auto-driven sprawl that they like for themselves but would prefer others would decline--would rather such stores didn't exist and who go to bizzare lengths to make it difficult for the big-boxes to do business within city limits.

Take, for example, Tucson's ordinance requiring that retailiers meeting the "big box" criterion can only devote 10% of their floor space to groceries, that is, unless it devotes greater than 90% of its floorspace to groceries. Instead of letting the businesses assume the risk of determining what consumers want, the City Council, back in 1999, pretended to do so for them.

Of course, the Councilmen didn't have the consumer in mind at all. We can't even say that the ordinance was a misguided effort to "protect" small business; the effect was to "protect" Albertson's, Food City, and big-box law flouting Fry's (notorious for using freight containers to keep itself under 100,000 square feet) from Target and Wal-Mart. Mark Kimble laid it out clearly in last Thursday's Citizen: the grocery restriction was included the big-box ordinance at the behest of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, the same, nefarious group trying to strong-arm Basha's--Arizona's only family-owned grocery chain and a regular contributor to various good causes--into unionizing its employees without a vote. Wal-Mart is, famously, union-free.

On the heels of securing neighborhood support and a favorable City Council vote for a Supercenter at 36th and Kino, Wal-Mart decided to go one further and petition to put the "Consumer Choice Initiative", repealing the grocery provisions of the big-box ordinance, on this November's ballot. 11,615 valid signatures were required, over 22,000 (one of them mine) were collected.

In the face of this seemingly strong support to at least see the question put to a vote, the City Clerk rejected the petitions, claiming that land-use regulations cannot be amended by the ballot initiative process. That may or may not be true; it's not enshrined in the State constitution, but it was the result of a 1997 court case.

The supposed reasoning behind the decision--if anyone can locate it, please leave a comment!--was that ballot initiatives would undermine the public participation supposedly central to the zoning process. The catch is: the big-box ordinance, with the grocery provision, was passed without public discussion!

Furthermore, land-use regulations are concerned with such matters as traffic, lighting, parking, noise pollution, and the like--externalities--and not with everything that goes on inside a store. A law saying Ace Hardware may not sell nails, only screws, or that drugstores can't sell newspapers unless they also sell Harry Potter, is not a land-use law, no matter where it's found in the statute, unless, like "public use" or "interstate commerce", every law is a land-use law.

Wal-Mart was ready to take the city to court, but has backed down for mysterious reasons. Was there a threat to renege on the variance involving 36th and Kino? Who knows. As a signer of the petition, I could be a plaintiff myself, but I'm too busy and too broke.

I've heard plenty of FUD and a few truly legitimate gripes about Wal-Mart, such as the corporate welfare it's been given in Prescott, but for the first time I can say that the company has let me down.

Postscript: It's clear which of Tucson's two newspapers is more favorable to enterprise--and to individual liberty in general--and it isn't the Daily Star. Keep that in mind when your subscription renewals come up.

Scanning the headlines...

From yesterday's Star:
125 here are hit by 'Ponzi scheme'

Of the roughly half-million retirees in the Tucson metro area, only 125 are saying "I paid 15% of my income to the Social Security system for fifty years, and this is what I get?"

(Real update--about ballot initiatives--to follow soon!)

Kromko's lost his mojo!

Until recently, if you'd have asked me who to go to for advice about ballot initiatives, I'd have recommended John Kromko. While we occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, he an old Great Society leftist and I someone who'd name his 'blog after Barry G. But he's the rare low-tax leftist, and on local issues, such as last year's RTA swindle, we're usually on the same page. More to the point, he is--or, rather, was--Arizona's expert in initiative politics.

Strange of him, then, to not only back but actually write a guaranteed loser! Having failed to collect the requisite amount of signatures to kill the so-called "garbage fee" (the one that isn't tied to service, can't be opted out of, and gets one's water shut off if one dosen't pay) two years ago, largely because he broke his arm and didn't ask for sufficient help, he's come back with a grotesque mashup that is not only ill-wrought but will also almost certainly violate the single-subject rule.

Called the Tucson Water Users' Bill of Rights, it proposes to repeal the garbage fee, forbid the association of any fee for any service other than water delivery with water usage or the water bill, and ban so-called "toilet to tap" use of treated effluent for drinking water.

Fair enough, although it already runs afoul of the single-subject rule. What comes next, however, is laughable. The measure would forbid the privatization or private outsourcing of garbage and water services! The last time I checked, private garbage service works well in unincorporated Pima County--better than the government-run service in the City--and aquifier-by-aquifier cap-and-trade privatization was the only means to acheieve sustainable water use in the desert. Apparently a now-and-forever ban on such things is worth it to Kromko because it prevents an end-run around this bill's provisions.

It gets worse. The last section of the initiative is a virtual poison pill, requiring new water connections to cease if CAP flows diminish more than 20% or when 140,000 acre-feet per year of delivery is to be exceeded. Rather than establish a water market wherein (e.g.) a golf course may sell its yearly use rights to a developer if it's profitable, Kromko would have development--infill, renewal, and sprawl alike--cease.

It's too bad Kromko didn't bring more people to the table when drafting this. We could have had multiple single-subject initiatives proposing sensible solutions, instead, we're treated to a multi-subject mess of nonsense, which, tellingly, Tucson Citizen political gossip columnist and economic ignoramus Jim Nintzel calls intelligent.